In the lumber industry, the harvesting of trees, which usually takes place in remote, heavily forested areas, is characterized by many preliminary operations subsequent to the felling of the trees before the trees are ready to be processed into lumber. One such preliminary operations involves the removal of limbs from the trees. The common practice today in most tree harvesting operations is to partially delimb the trees with a power saw at the point where they have been felled. Such partially delimbed trees are then dragged through the dirt and sand and pushed into piles with a skidder. Both these dragging and pushing operations coat the trees with dirt and when a power saw is used subsequently to cut the trees into eight foot lengths and to complete the delimbing operation on the trees, the blades of the power saws are dulled quickly because of the dirt. In addition, the accumulation of dirt on the tree is highly objectionable to those companies which process the trees into products such as paper. Other problems are encountered in tree harvesting operations such as there being only an intermittent use made of logging equipment, including skidders and faller bunchers so that such equipment is frequently idle adding to the cost of the harvesting of trees. Under present day circumstances, the skidder operator spends the majority of his time off the skidder delimbing trees by hand with a power saw or pushing or piling the trees with the skidder instead of skidding.
Various machines have been proposed to delimb trees but all of such present day delimbing machinery is characterized by certain disadvantages. Although such delimbing machinery utilizes various arrangements for feeding a tree through a delimbing apparatus, the delimbing operation performed by such machinery is inadequate and is not only characterized by a slow production rate but is usually quite complicated in construction and operation so as to be subject to frequent breakdown. In addition, such present day delimbing machinery accumulates piles of removed limbs which must be removed periodically by equipment such as a skidder, but additionally randomly deposits delimbed trees in the machine area which must be moved and piled by additional equipment.